New York Times and USA Today Bestselling novelist, screenwriter, editor, namer, critic, movie addict and chocoholic

Thursday, April 9, 2015

Alice Eve Cohen talks about The Year My Mother Came Back, worrying, writing, and more!

I'm thrilled to be interviewing Alice Eve Cohen here. Her memoir, The Year my Mother Came Back, is about how relationships--especially those with our mothers--don't end after death, but continue in surprising and profound ways. Her first
memoir, What I Thought I Knew won the Elle's Grand Prix for Nonfiction; it was selected as one of Oprah
Magazine’s 25 Best Books of Summer and Salon's Best Books of the Year.
Her solo theater adaptation of the book has been produced at the Kitchen
Theater in Ithaca and other venues. Thank you so much, Alice!

Q: There’s so much in
the book about when we ourselves become mothers, we yearn for our own
mothers--even if they were not stellar in the maternal department. Even
though your mom is dead, you still find yourself needing her, and most
miraculously, you get to have her.

A: I’d pretty much
exiled my mother from my memories for decades. During this crazily difficult
year, I found myself yearning for her in a way I never had before. Then
suddenly, there she was, sitting beside me at my kitchen table, typing on her
old, manual typewriter.

A fringe benefit of
writing this book is that my daughters also get to have her. Just last
night, I asked Eliana, my fifteen-year-old, what she thinks of her grandmother,
now that she’s read the book, and she said, “She inspires me. I’m humbled by
her work and dedication as an early feminist, before that was accepted at all
in American society. I wish I could meet her. I feel privileged even to be able
to meet her in this way, through this book.”

Q: What I so love
about this memoir is that you have included the fantasies you had.

A: The fantasies are
the heart of the book. My mother died such a long time ago that I’d nearly
forgotten her. She came back to me in a flood of memories and vivid fantasies.
She was at my side during my radiation treatments. We had conversations and
arguments. She revealed secrets she’d never told me before. I asked her advice
on parenting. Her answers surprised and enraged me. We fought. We forgave each
other.

For a while I thought
the memoir police would arrest me, for violating some unwritten law of
memoir-writing. I talked to my editor about it, and I’m so grateful that she
encouraged me to free my imagination. It allowed me to bring my mother to life
on the page as a fully realized character.

Q: Did writing this
book intensify the conversations you have with your mother (do you still have
them?) or lessen them?

A: My mother is with
me, but in a very different way now. She’s not in the room any more.

A: You recognize that
time alters memory. Yet, there is still such truth on every page. Which
makes me want to ask you: If stories change with the telling, and we are always
changing ourselves, what do we mean by truth?

B: Wow, your question
goes to the fundamental, paradoxical core of memoir. A memoir is a story told
through a subjective process that includes remembering and forgetting,
imagining and inventing. Everything alters memory—time, emotion, current
events, brain chemistry, caffeine, aging, childbirth, politics, you name it.
Whenever we look at an old photograph, or hear an evocative piece of music, or
read someone else’s account of that event, it changes our memory. From the
moment an experience slips from the present into the past, it starts to change.
Every time we describe an experience, the story evolves, and so does our memory
of it. I have an insatiable
appetite for stories. I love the fluid and mutable quality of storytelling.
Humans are the storytelling species. It’s in our DNA. I love being a
storyteller.

Q: Do you think if you
had written this book say, ten years from now, it would be different?

A: I can’t imagine
writing this book at any other time. I wrote it exactly when I needed to.

Q: What I also love
about the book is the humor. And then you move to emotion that’s wrenching.

A: I’m not religious,
but I have a religious faith in humor. I subscribe to the belief that even in
the most difficult circumstances, there’s salvation in story value. I love to
make people laugh, and if I can’t laugh at myself I’m doomed. In Jewish
folklore, if you’re too happy, it’s an invitation to the Evil Eye. Once you let
the Evil eye in, you’re in terrible danger. In the book, I talk about the Evil
Eye in a self-mocking way. When things are going too well, I’m terrified.

Q: I love your
question, “Who gets happiness?” Care to answer?

A: I’m better at
questions than answers. There’s a chapter about happiness in the book, and it’s
all questions.

Q: This was one hell
of a year for you, yet you managed with grace and humor. Are you a worrier?

A: I am a word-class
worrier, an Olympic gold medalist.

Q: What’s obsessing
you now and why?

A: I’m obsessed with
my students’ stories. I teach creative writing and playwriting at The New
School. My current playwriting students are wonderfully diverse—nationality,
race and ethnicity, sexual orientation, and age. Their plays are equally
diverse, and I’m fascinated by their works-in-progress.

Q: (What question
didn’t I ask that I should have?) What are you working on now?

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My 11th novel CRUEL BEAUTIFUL WORLD will be published 10/5/16 by Algonquin. IS THIS TOMORROW was an May Indie Pick. I'm also the New York Times bestselling author of PICTURES OF YOU, a San Francisco Chronicle Lit Pick, a Costco "Pennie's Pick." a NAIBA bestseller and on the Best Books of 2011 List from San Francisco Chronicle, Providence Journal, Kirkus Reviews and Bookmarks Magazine. I'm the recipient of a New York Foundation of the Arts Grant in Fiction. I was a 2013 finalist in the Sundance Screenwriting Lab and a finalist in the Nickelodeon Screenwriting Fellowship, four of my novels were optioned for screen, and I talked my way into writing the script for two of them. My essay, HIgh Infidelity, has been optioned for film. I'm a book critic for The San Francisco Chronicle and People Magazine. I teach novel writing for UCLA Extension Writers' Program, and Stanford online, do private fiction editing, and I am a professional namer! I live with my husband, writer/editor Jeff Tamarkin and we beam with pride about our son, an actor/filmmaker in college. Visit me at http://www.carolineleavitt.com.